Netflix recently launched its sixth season of the anthology series Black Mirror, and its inaugural episode, Joan Is Awful, is quite a doozy. The episode is a bit of self-parody where a Streamberry viewer (i.e. a viewer from a platform very similar to Netflix) named Joan watches in horror as a show is aired based exactly on her life, plus or minus some significant embellishments (she is played by Salma Hayek, yall).
The second episode, Loch Henry, continues the self-parodying trend with amateur documentarians attempting to create content about a series of gruesome murders in one of their hometowns. They ultimately create this content for Streamberry, and we get an examination of the behind-the-scenes nature of how this content is made and what purposes it serves.
What follows are narratives that heavily come down against the content media environment Netflix helped build. This type of product raises the interesting question of “whether a company like Netflix can actually be receptive to such commentary, even for the ones aired on its own platform?”